The new Sprint Cup champion connects with a younger, hipper crowd. / Kevin Liles, US Presswire

by Nate Ryan, USA TODAY Sports

by Nate Ryan, USA TODAY Sports

The new Sprint Cup champion is a beer-swilling, vulgarity-spewing punk who looks and acts as if he just absconded with rapacious glee from a home for wayward teens.

If you don't know much about NASCAR but were watching ESPN after the past two Sprint Cup races, that might be a reasonable conclusion to draw about Brad Keselowski.

Which would be sad because it couldn't be more untethered from reality than the misconception that Jimmie Johnson must not like pounding Coronas or surfing golf carts because he sometimes gives stilted answers in TV interviews.

Keselowski isn't a self-destructive degenerate who will lead the nation down a path to the debauchery and ruin embodied by Jersey Shore.

He is a role model for perseverance, leadership and, yes, emotional growth. An ebullient touchstone for ushering in a hipper, younger era for 21st century stock-car racing amidst its slump in audience.

NASCAR didn't crown a problem child ill-suited for a chief ambassadorship Sunday night at Homestead-Miami Speedway, where Keselowski launched into an admittedly alcohol-fueled euphoria that went viral just as quickly as his expletive-laden postrace tirade against his peers after the race at Phoenix International Raceway a week earlier.

When he showed up at the W hotel in Miami Beach early Monday morning, Keselowski had traded in his mammoth beer stein for a bottle of water. And as he circled the trendy nightclub looking nondescript in a ballcap among the beautiful people of South Beach, he accepted countless congratulations with grace and absent any displays of boorish behavior (well, excepting when he jumped on a couch as Queen's We Are the Champions boomed off the walls).

Keselowski then flew to Bristol, Conn., and engagingly represented the Sprint Cup Series with aplomb in a daylong procession of media activities that will continue Tuesday with Good Morning America and The Late Show With David Letterman.

There is no need to temper the personality of such a free spirit who can alternate between fascinatingly cerebral and charmingly goofy as quickly as his crew changes tires. There's no danger in it, either.

"He eats, sleeps and drinks wanting to be a race car driver," said Hendrick Motorsports owner Rick Hendrick, who laments having Keselowski swiped by Roger Penske three years ago. "He brings a level of intensity that I see in very few people, just that determined."

That single-minded focus wasn't always a positive for Keselowski, who antagonized many veterans early in his career and struggled to strike the proper balance between inspired confidence and soul-sapping arrogance.

"I was trying too hard to be the I in team," he said.

Yet despite that team-first philosophy, it's probably not an overstatement to say Penske Racing won its first title in NASCAR's premier series primarily because of Keselowski - and far beyond him just being the driver of the No. 2 Dodge.

Keselowski has pushed the team toward excellence in myriad ways this season - whether it was improving its cars to match Hendrick, hiring Joey Logano as a teammate for next season or encouraging his boss to upgrade the team's fitness center.

He is in daily contact with Penske about everything from personnel moves to the team's upcoming switch to Ford, and he provides constant lists of details to address.

"He's galvanized the team," Penske said. "Never does he miss a day coming in the shop, putting his arm around the guys, and that makes a big difference. You can be a big shot, but you've got to get down on the ground and work with the guys that are doing all this work day in and day out."

That blue-collar work ethic, which was honed as the runt of a working class family in the suburbs of Detroit, manifests itself in modest tributes that sometimes are easy to miss. Keselowski forbids any photos taken of him inside a personal jet because he doesn't want to feed the perception that NASCAR drivers are spoiled, pampered athletes.

That doesn't mean he might not occasionally find himself in a controversial or compromising position on the national stage.

"That's as sweet as life gets, to know that you have people around you that can make up for you when you make mistakes," Keselowski said. "Because we all make mistakes, and I make a ton of them."